Full Auto E3 2005 Preshow First Look

Vehicular Mayhem

Obliterate the city of Staunton in Pseudo Interactive's first Xbox 360 game, Full Auto.

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It's not every day you walk into a darkened conference room about to see your first Xbox 360 game, so we tried to keep our cool when Sega recently invited us to look at Full Auto, a new car combat game in development at Toronto-based Pseudo Interactive. The easiest way to describe Full Auto is with a phrase like "Burnout meets Twisted Metal," and while it looks like there will be a lot more going on in the game than such a simplification would imply, that analogy is a good place to start. Even in its extremely early state, Full Auto was already showing off more stuff blowing up than we've seen in just about any action game in memory. And that's saying a lot.

We didn't manage to get many story details for Full Auto out of Pseudo's reps. We're not even sure this game needs a storyline. The premise is simple enough: Choose a tricked-out street car, outfit your ride with an array of high-powered weaponry, and race at breakneck speed through the city streets, outrunning or blowing away your competitors and destroying as much public and private property as you can. You'll apparently be cast as a retired driver being pushed back into racing by the Shepherds, a gang that has taken hold of the city of Staunton. Pseudo is still playing with many aspects of the game's design, though we were told the game will have a cohesive career mode, as well as other modes like pursuit, arena, and tag. Eight-player online support will round out the package, presumably taking place on the Xbox 360's as-yet-unnamed online service.

Pseudo reps stressed that Full Auto is a racing game first and a combat game second, though it looks like you'll get in plenty of shooting action as you speed through Staunton's five districts. Your primary objective in any race is to navigate the winding streets and cross the finish line before any of your seven competitors. How you get those competitors out of the way is up to you--you can blow them away with grenade launchers, side-mounted shotguns, and smokescreens, or maybe you'd like to bring a massive elevated train track (complete with train, natch) crashing down on top of them. The game will tally the dollar amount of your destruction as you race, and this value will be used like a score at the end of each run. As you play through the game, you'll pick up new weapons and upgrades, some of which can even be mounted on the rear of the car.

Time controls have been big in game design for several years now, with everybody from Max Payne to Microsoft's own ill-fated Blinx earning his or her temporal chops. So why has it taken this long for time manipulation to work its way into racing games? Full Auto's most interesting feature is the "unwreck" ability, which will let you rewind the action every time you crash, miss a jump, or just want to replay the last few seconds of the race. You'll have only limited access to this feature, since unwreck will deplete a finite meter rapidly as you use it. From what we could see in the two demo tracks on offer, there will be plenty of secret jumps, shortcuts, and opportunities for excessive destruction, so you'll want to save your unwreck for the places you really need it. Pseudo says its aim with Full Auto's time control is to never make you restart a race again just because you messed up a turn in the first five seconds, and it looks like unwreck will go a long way toward achieving that goal.

It's a safe bet that you've never seen this much raw activity in a racing game before. Every explosion is accompanied by pieces of, well, everything flying all over the place. Take out a phone booth, and you're going to see glass flying in all directions. Blow out the side of a building, and you've got debris everywhere. Cars spit sparks and belch smoke when they fly through tight turns and rub against each other. Even the aforementioned train spewed seats and other sundry objects when it ate the pavement. You'll be able to target just about any object in the environment and trash it--either by running into it or blowing it away--and watch it be reduced to its component parts, the flights of which will be fully governed by the game's encompassing physics system.

Full Auto uses a comprehensive physics system to govern everything from the way cars smash and crumple to the destruction of environmental elements.

This kind of destructive freedom owes to the fact that nearly every element of Full Auto's scenes is physically modeled, especially the cars you'll drive. Have you ever seen the Microsoft XNA video where a car crashes realistically into a wall? The cars in Full Auto wreck a lot like that, in that the damage they take corresponds directly to where and how hard they were hit by another car or flying object. The artists are doing a "physics pass" on each of the cars in the game to model the way their pieces are put together, so the physics system can realistically bash them, dent them, and take them apart when they're involved in wrecks of varying intensity. A brief slow-motion demonstration of this system revealed smashed-in fenders, dented side panels, and other damage. Based on this demo, we'd say it's a safe bet that none of the cars will be showroom-ready at the end of a race--the damage is extreme, to say the least.